Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 8 (March 18)

 Greetings!

We are officially over half way through the Spring semester.  I don't know about you, but once we hit daylight savings time and the days get longer, the days also seem to fly by more quickly!

For the Quick Write this week students had 3 options: 

• March 18 is National Awkward Moments Day.  What is the most embarrassing or awkward situation that you’ve been in?
• March 19 is National Let’s Laugh Day.  Tell about one of the funniest experiences you’ve had. 
• Tuesday, March 16, was National Everything You Do is Right Day.  If you didn’t have to worry about making mistakes, what challenge, adventure, or risk might you take? 

We had one Word of the Day

strabismic -- fr. Greek, strabizo, "to squint" -- A visual defect in which one eye cannot focus with the other on an object because of imbalance of the eye muscles.  Often used in referenced to being cross-eyed.  (I shared that one of my daughters had a strabismus, which occurs when the eyes are not aligned so she had surgery when she was 5 to move the muscles in her eyes.)

I handed back the rough drafts of the Examples or Analogy Essays that the students had written.  As part of our writing/grammar instruction, I covered common errors in the papers.  For this round of essays, these were the topics:  amount vs. number; less vs. fewer; scared vs. afraid; the word "things;" contractions; and noun/pronoun agreement.  The final drafts are due next week.  Note:  A number of students did not get their rough drafts in on time.   I might be able to get them corrected before the next class period; if not, they will be returned next week during class.

We have read two more Short Stories:  "Makes the Whole World Kin" and "The Furnished Room."  The first story is about a burglar who makes an uncommon connection with the man he's robbing, and that is the one that we talked about.  O. Henry's stories are full of unexpected twists and endings.

For the Grammar portion of our class, we are continuing to review sentence patterns.  This week, we are "building" sentences that follow the N-V-N (S-V-DO) and N-V-N-N (S-V-IO-DO) patterns, so we discussed transitive verbs, direct objects, and indirect objects.  We had time in class to work on our worksheets.

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

Mrs. Prichard

Assignments for Next Week:

• Examples/Analogy  Final Draft

• First Five/Last Five Mistakes

• Short Stories:  Read Retrieved Reformation & The Pimienta Pancake

• 2 Short Story Worksheets

• Grammar – Wk8:  Sentence Patterns N-V-N

• Grammar – Wk8: Sentence Patterns N-V-N-N

Links for This Week

Class Notes

Tamera M. Prichard

Writing Instructor at CHAT

Writing 1, Writing 2, Writing 3

ACT Prep, British Literature